Reconsidering the end goals

I31

We need to change the end goal. Is the end goal about economic growth and increasing wealth or is the end goal...human well-being and quality of life? There is a really rich discourse around those things - gross national happiness and genuine progress indicators and those sorts of things. It's not enough just to do the academic research and come up with these ideas, there has to be direct correlations within the politics.

Building autonomous networks

I28

The state is using...these new innovations and technology to encroach upon us and I believe the potential of technology to undermine that and to pose real threats to state and capital are quite acute and I'm interested in building anti-surveillance and anonymity structures online. Housing the technology so that it's not dependent on the structures [that seek to]...capitalize...on those communications technologies....How can we build networks and systems that are completely autonomous that don't rely on those things? But...I'm also constantly questioning these sorts of pursuits...in relation to...climate chaos and the end of energy and so [also] thinking about how technology has a horizon.

Everyday winning

I21

You know what [winning] looks like for me? [It] looks like my life. My life if my kids were around me…[I’ve] got a place to live, little garden, a guaranteed annual income because I'm on a pension now, time to engage in conversation, time to be with friends and family, time to go for a walk on the beach, time to listen to some music. I think my life is so privileged except for what capitalism has done to take my sons away from me, which is an economic and social phenomenon. What capitalism has done is to make me lonely.

Moving on

I21

I think that your generation is starting ahead of where my generation started and that brings me some hope. Now I think there are a bunch of things that I think you guys are doing that is totally as stupid as we did but there are things that I think you are thinking about, and concerned about, and critical about, and open about that was not reflected in the left wing movements of the sixties and seventies….there were many things we couldn't have known. But I think this generation of activists has a body of knowledge based on the trajectory of things that have happened in the last thirty, forty years that you are actually more humble about.

Memories of struggle

I1

Here in Nova Scotia we're losing all kinds of memory of our own history everyday as people pass away. In the late ‘80s, as an undergrad student, I had a project [in] a labour history course I was taking….I went up to Cape Breton and interviewed folks in their kitchens around what was happening with the mine workers’ strikes in the ‘20s and ‘30s. The best folks died and I don't think I realized at the time how useful that stuff was. We don't have that even going on today and we're losing…[our collective] memory….we don't have a tremendous amount of intergenerational memory on what [struggles were] about, what [they were] fighting for, what the underlying basis [for them was.]

A rock and a hard place

I23

Yes, socialism is still necessary but at the present moment if there is no real socialist possibility we might have to bite the bullet and become involved in reform activities which we have very little hope in. That's the present tragic dilemma of the Left and of the world.

Winning is a collective process

I27

Winning is the ability to develop a collective process in which we're destroying the things that are unjust in this world. I have my particular perspectives of what that world should look like but my overall perspective is that that perspective should change as that's happening, especially since it's a collective process….I can't [inscribe] an individual viewpoint onto a collective future, it should be a collective viewpoint onto a collective future. I think then that what a post-capitalist society would look like [is] hard to exactly imagine...because it would still be a place of constant struggle. There's no ideal way of being.

Everyday solidarity

I1

In union organizing drives and on picket lines...I've seen...racism, sexism break down. I mean not immediately, not in the first day or two, but over a period of time. Folks start to see that the person who's working with them side by side or standing with them in the picket line has a hell of a lot more in common with them then they do with the boss who's making racist jokes and sexist jokes.

Violence and social change

I10

I think that there is a time and place for violence and it's different in different countries. I want to say that it isn't justified but, at the same time, if that is the only way that you will get your message across and that is the only way that you can change something and make the people in power listen [then you can’t dismiss it]... but it's definitely less accepted in our society then it is in other countries like in South America or even in Europe. But I think that it's a short lived activism. It's kind of like you light a fuse and then the fuse burns down, and down, and down and finally you have an explosion but after that explosion what is there? There's ash and bits of charred ground and I don't think that, in and of itself, can make lasting change. But there is a time and place for that explosion.

Pulling up oppression by the roots

I29

...removing patriarchy and sexism...would create such a ripple effect that there would be so much more potential. I think that a lot of what goes on that is negative can be traced to those roots.